What is an invalid solid?
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I have a plan view of a simple truck cab. I used Joint Push/Pull plugin to pull all of the faces up. I grouped that "solid". I did the same with the side view of the cab; JPP and then grouped. I used the BoolTools plugin to create my nice, intersected truck cab, but every single time the plugin tells me that my first group was not a "valid solid" (or words to that effect) which would produce unpredictable results. Well, it does, and the intersecting doesn't work properly.
Could someone please talk me down off of the bridge?
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You might get a better response if you ask this in the developer's section, since all the listed plugins are not official SU plugins, but developed by outside sources (all of whom frequent the developr forum regularly).
Anyhow, I'll have a go at it. I think that there must be a hole somewhere in your geometry. And booltools seems to be seeing it and that means that it will not be able to act as a boolean object. The way to fix it is to find the hole and make a face there. Holes like this often come from tiny geometry, and SU often can't make faces on tiny geometry. So you might need to scale the entire model up by 100 times, then patch the hole, then scale it down bown 100 times.
I wrote a script called label faces ( http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=17876&hilit=plugin )that goes through an essentically findes each edge that is not bound by a face - thus creating a hole. So if you scale everything up, then run my tool and look for any holes it finds, you should be able to patch them. Then scasle it all back down.
Try that and see if it does the trick. If not, again, you might go ask in the developers section, since most of the script authors check that forum regularly.
Good luck,
Chris
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Chris,
Thank you for the link, for the ruby script, and the advice. I applied your suggestions and that has solved my problem. I do recall it being mentioned that one should scale a model up significantly at times, but I never understood why. Now I do!Your script showed me right away where I had issues, and I was able to fix them easily and then use BoolTools successfully.
Many thanks!
Craig.
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